by Nat Hrvatin. @NatHrvatin.
ALBANY, NY - During the Saturday evening performance of Les Miserables, regional theatre actress Delia Devereaux performed as Fantine with a prominent blob of barbecue sauce across her ghostly nightgown costume. Devereaux claimed the stain was not at all due to eating a half-rack of ribs while waiting two hours for her final five-minute scene, but rather a conscious effort to complete Fantine’s character arc.
“At the beginning, Fantine is famished, as her debts to the Thérnardiers have left her unable to properly feed and care for herself,” Devereaux explained backstage while drinking from a Big Gulp held inches away from her mouth. “Yet, by the end of the show, Fantine has found peace in heaven. And, Fantine’s peace is best symbolized by a lemon-sized glob of The Devil’s Inferno hot barbecue sauce.”
Anna Nolans, the director of the production, expressed her skepticism of Devereaux’s character choice.
“During tech, I warned Delia repeatedly not to eat or drink in costume.” Nolans remarked while unscrolling her graduate thesis paper on dramaturgical condiment analysis. “Not only is it irresponsible, but also it is anachronous. An eighteenth-century woman would only have access to that particular brand of barbecue sauce if she had the ability to travel through time.”
Devereaux showed interest in Nolans’ time-travel hypothesis and inquired if the production could cut some scenes and, “skip the Valjean identity fraud part and the Javert obsessive stalker routine.” By jumping from Fantine’s death to her reappearance, Devereaux hopes to “get home at a reasonable hour.”
Ingenue Allison Douglas stated her admiration and noted how Deveraux’s character choice has inspired her own performance as Cosette.
“Delia evoked my own-reimagining,” Allison explained, while wiping her Cheeto-dust-encrusted hands over Cosette’s wedding dress. “Cosette, too, has been victimized by the Thérnardiers. It only makes sense that Cosette, like her mother, would wear stains representing the struggles of her past and the boredom of waiting until Act Two for your first entrance.”
Devereaux plans on furthering her character choice by changing the finale lyrics to, “Come with me, where stains will always find you” in next week’s performances.